Red Hat 4, father say me down on one of his Frankenstein computers built out of his trash heap in our basement and told me to have fun. I found tux racing konquest and played the shit out of them

Same reason people are pissed at Biden for every handling of that 100% falls within the domain of another governmental branch. Currently the executive branch is sorta Atlasing our entire government which requires them to severely overreach their powers opening them up to checks and balances by the other highly sabotaged branches that both seemingly wish to force our entire government to accomplish nothing. The most publicized example of this is three student loan forgiveness package that Biden's administration tried to pass that got blocked, though there are lots of other examples.

The reality is that the executive branch as a whole has very little long term reach and we need to be pressuring Congress to do literally anything at all. The only time I'm going to look at Biden and say "this is his fault" is when I see Congress pass a bill doing something like sending an aid package to Gaza and/or Ukraine, only to have him refuse to sign. Which I suspect he'd actually just sign something like that through. We'll never know for sure because two of our federal branches are too busy playing something vaguely resembling a game of football where the ball is a 50 lb boulder and everyone's screaming that they keep subbing their toes on on it.

One of the biggest downsides of a VPN; you share an exit node with lots of other people, only takes one bad actor to get your exit node ip banned

I wish I had been born in Denmark or Norway - at least their social democratic safety nets would allow my community to thrive as the world burns around us

I feel this in my soul.

Yes. That's a question that has been raised by the US department of state that we might see an answer to in our life times of we're lucky.

We're not bound to sell weapons but we're bound to provide aid by a combination of Mutual Defense Assistance Agreement (1952) which I can't find the text of from my phone... Need to wait till I'm near a computer to try again and Mutual Logistics Support Agreement (1991) which I linked elsewhere in the thread.

https://www.dsca.mil/programs/excess-defense-articles-eda Does explicitly allow the sale of arms to a list of nations from my understanding. This is a huge rabbit hole of laws and then exceptions to laws.

whether I personally agree any of this is right is a different story here

Summary of our obligations from the state department https://www.state.gov/u-s-security-cooperation-with-israel/

The two that apply here are that arms can be dispersed with only congressional notification and that we're have multiple bilateral defense agreements with them.

Hamas issued an attack on Israel which triggered the bilateral defense agreements and one way to remedy would be to deploy supplies to the region with congressional notification.

Just imagine the damage to the region if we took bilateral defense to it's logical conclusion and dispatched actual military aid.

This is not Biden "going around Congress". This is Congress explicitly granting permission in advance to do it as long as they are notified.

(Worth noting I've never looked this deeply into this before so I'm learning about this clown fiesta as well. It goes pretty deep...)

Ah you are correct. They are a non-nato ally as they are out of geographical scope.

https://www.state.gov/u-s-security-cooperation-with-israel/#:~:text=Israel%20has%20been%20designated%20as,relationship%20with%20the%20United%20States.

This world be applicable though.

It's the NATO agreement. https://www.nato.int/nato_static_fl2014/assets/pdf/stock_publications/20120822_nato_treaty_en_light_2009.pdf

Article 5 is the one that got invoked by the Hamas attack

As stated in another thread, at this point Biden has done enough to cover against any legal retaliation however, and 100% command a withdrawal of US support as Israel has actually been using the supplies to commit war crimes

The best way to think of it is that the presidents power is roughly bellcurved relative to how much Congress is in alignment with them. If Congress is completely out of alignment with them they have very little power because congress can pass a vote on what he vetos or issue a stop on any executive action he takes. If Congress is slightly in alignment or out of alignment he becomes able to singlehandedly stop laws and executive actions aren't likely to get overruled and will have up go under judicial review. If Congress is completely in alignment with him, he doesn't need to use his veto powers or executive actions and if he does they likely won't be contested anyway but we're generally better off with Congress passing a law.

Cool, sounds good to me. Thanks again, I was finding myself eagerly anticipating your responses because I was definitely learning some new things about why people dislike his handling of the Gaza genocides. You've made some really good points. I think he's made a good enough case at this point that NATO is no longer applicable in the case of genocide. At least with to protect him from retaliation if he did command a stop of US support to a NATO ally.

There's no congressional approval needed as he is driven by treaty to provide arms, if anything he is compelled by Congress to send arms as long as Israel is at war as a US ally due to NATO.

He's trying to make the argument that Israel committing genocide with those arms is reason to withdraw support, unfortunately the US government moves at a glacial pace on it's best day to the point that the US military is actually somehow faster. Given the number of Democrats that do support Israel, its entirely realistic that he could get successfully impeached if he failed to comply.

Anyway... Thanks for the civil debate but work is starting so I need to go, I'll read your next message bit I probably won't have time to reply.